I first visited Jerusalem in 1941. I was looking forward to an agreeable sick leave after a small flesh wound in the desert. Unfortunately as the train moved slowly up from Lydda, I felt more and more ill and finally I collapsed on the platform of Jerusalem station and was removed on a stretcher to a requisitioned Italian hospital. A ridiculous small insect had infected me with a tiresome small disease.

My visit was less disagreeable than its unfavourable beginning would seem. I soon recovered from my sandfly fever, but as they had carelessly placed me in a bed next to a patient suffering from diphtheria, I was incarcerated in the hospital, or so they supposed, in quarantine for another fortnight. This was not quite so aggravating as one might think. The Italian hospital was furnished with an outside staircase just opposite my bed, and after my temperature had been taken in the morning I escaped by it for most of the day. If I was missed, no one informed me, and, as I suppose it is now too late to court martial me, I can explain that with the fortnight's quarantine and the effective sick leave which followed (I spent it at Amdursky's Central Hotel in Ben Yehuda Street) I visited most of the sacred spots without either a professional guide or a Baedeker, except my grandmother's grounding in the Bible. It was not a bad way to see the holy city since, in the middle of the war, there was not much commercialisation, and no one paid much attention to a slightly bandaged lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade wandering about the city and its neighbourhood.